Theatre on Film

“Pina” and “Carnage.”

For anyone who feels the lack of formal wear in the cinema of today, “Pina” will be a tonic. Most of the people in Wim Wenders’s new film sport an easy glamour of which Marlene Dietrich might have approved: the men in two- or three-piece suits, the women in evening gowns of a luscious hue. Dietrich would have arched an eyebrow, it’s true, at the minor breaks with convention: the lipstick smeared like jam across a face, or the fact that few of the gentlemen choose to bother with shoes. Quibbles aside, who could find fault with these chivalrous folk? Consider the lady in the sheer black dress, who keels over in a swoon; see how her beau contrives to catch her, again and again, just before she hits the ground.

“Pina” is a documentary, devoid of plot, narration, and chronological structure, yet it is crammed to bursting with these short stories—character studies that jump out of nowhere, explode into action, then stop. Why is the woman fainting? Who is she, anyway, and what is her relationship to the guy? We know nothing, except that their needs and their fates are obviously locked together. There are times when that lock becomes too tight and grating to bear, as when a blond figure, garbed in ice-blue, crawls through a room on all fours, while another woman shovels earth onto her, in a doomed but determined bid to bury her alive. There is no explicit sex here (the movie is rated PG), but enough of the implicit kind, alternately tender and aggressive, to make you squirm.

For years, Wenders was planning a collaboration with the German choreographer Pina Bausch, who had run the Tanztheater Wuppertal, in northwest Germany, since the early nineteen-seventies. Two days before the rehearsal shoot, in June, 2009, and five days after being given a diagnosis of cancer, Bausch died, at the age of sixty-eight. Wenders shut down production, resuming only with the consent of Bausch’s family and the encouragement of her dancers. He filmed the dancers in excerpts from four of her longer pieces, including the startling “Café Müller” (1978) and her interpretation of “The Rite of Spring.” Mingled with these are solos and duets by members of the company, many of them captured in the open air; a man clambers up a dirt cliff, for example, high above a quarry, and hurls himself about on the brink. More incongruous still are those who go through rapturous motions beside a road, with traffic buzzing by: first, a tall Australian, sheathed in gold, and then a cavorting couple with a McDonald’s sign in the background. Whatever they’re up to, they’re lovin’ it.

The question is, What do you get from “Pina” that you could not get from watching the Tanztheater live? Answer: More than you could possibly believe. This is not just a matter of the al-fresco scenes, or of our proximity to the dancers, near enough to hear them pant. There is also Wenders’s decision to shoot the film in 3-D, and, in so doing, to goad stereoscopic technology into its first leap since “Avatar.” Not before time; 3-D was stalling badly, but now we are back on track, thanks to Scorsese’s “Hugo” and to Wenders, who takes no more than a minute to flourish his credentials. Dancers file across a stage, then loop around a transparent curtain. We watch for a moment from the wings, as they process toward us, and our vision carries us down the line of people and through the veil. You can trawl through cinema and find few more beautiful, more unforced, or more fleeting representations of the bourn between the living and the dead.

All this finds an echo in Bausch herself. We see an old black-and-white clip of her dancing in “Café Müller,” wearing a plain shift, with eyes downcast—“as if she’d risen from the dead,” somebody recalls, and “Pina” should be read less as a polite memorial than as a palpitating act of resurrection. I always longed, and failed, to see Bausch’s work when she was alive; but now, to an alarming degree, my wish has been granted. Viewers elsewhere have been disappointed by the interviews that litter the movie—head shots of dancers, overlaid with their spoken tributes to Bausch. To complain that these verge on cliché (“She combined fragility with strength”), however, is beside the point, because her art takes off at the precise juncture where words run out. There are situations, as she admits in the film, “that leave you utterly speechless. All you can do is hint at things.”

Those hints are in Wenders, too. His finest films are not hits like “Paris, Texas” (1984) and “Wings of Desire” (1987) but “Alice in the Cities” (1974) and “Kings of the Road” (1976), made in the forlorn wake of the nineteen-sixties, and blessed with what the German film historian Thomas Elsaesser calls “a new partisanship for images,” as opposed to the faltering, hamstrung language of political protest. What resulted was a volley of unpredictable gestures—solemn or wild, often futile, but not without a streak of comic dignity. Near the start of “Kings of the Road,” on a sunny morning, a man drives his VW Beetle at full tilt into a river. He stays in the driver’s seat as the water rises, furiously turning the steering wheel this way and that, as if he still had someplace to go and some hope of getting there. Who would have seen the joke, and the horror, more clearly than Pina Bausch?

In the same vein, who is better placed than Wenders to film the unforgettable sequence at the heart of “Café Müller”? A man positions an older couple in a posture of tragic love, briskly placing their arms around each other, then hoisting the woman up until she is cradled, childlike, by the older man; think of King Lear being instructed how to carry Cordelia. Whereupon the woman slides free and falls to the floor, with a thump, and the younger man has to come to the couple’s aid once more. But is he actually helping them, you wonder, or could he be wrenching them against their will? Do they just want to be left in peace? You could argue that Wenders, led by Bausch, has made a political film—or, at any rate, a film whose most intimate gestures are shaded with power play. Angela Merkel saw “Pina” when it showed at the Berlin Film Festival, in February (there is a splendid photograph of her in 3-D spectacles), and it may well have equipped her for euro-zone negotiations. If Nicolas Sarkozy sprints toward her and tries to land in her lap, she’ll know what to do.

What is unambiguous is the campaign that “Pina” mounts, with joy and without fuss, against age discrimination; by law, the film should be screened, on a monthly basis, for Hollywood casting agents. There are performers over sixty-five, and people who have stayed with the Tanztheater for decades, and one dancer who is the child of two others. Bodies grow wiser and more expressive over time, though ever more open to the ravages of loss; look at them drift to and fro like sleepwalkers, in “Café Müller,” to the sorrowful strains of Purcell. Yet Wenders does not want his homage to end in tears. Instead, we close with a healthy, Teutonic walk in the country, and a parade of smiling dancers. We are meant to think of the dance of death, glimpsed on a hillside in the finale of “The Seventh Seal,” and of the departed Pina Bausch. Yet her troupe of followers, young and old, could hardly seem more alive. They shake their fists, not in anger but in glee, like children who have just scored a goal or opened a Christmas gift.

More than fifty years ago, Roman Polanski began to trace the theme of intrusion that has gripped him ever since. Look at his short films, like “Murder” and “Teeth Smile,” both made in 1957, or the subsequent trio of “Knife in the Water,” “Repulsion,” and “Cul-de-Sac,” all sweating with apprehension at new arrivals or existing threats. From there, it is but a skip to his latest movie, “Carnage,” which finds Nancy (Kate Winslet) and her husband, Alan (Christoph Waltz), entering the New York apartment of Michael (John C. Reilly) and his wife, Penelope (Jodie Foster). Reilly is not that huge, and Foster not that tiny, yet somehow each highlights the other, to an absurd degree, as if the Cowardly Lion had hooked up with a Munchkin.

The film stays in the apartment, and you wish it wouldn’t. Alan, a lawyer, gets as far as the elevator, but he keeps being called back for coffee, or for the next level of antagonism. The sons of the two couples, it seems, got into a playground fight; teeth were broken, and now an apology is in order. And so the fur begins to fly. Few directors are more skilled than Polanski at peeling back niceties to reveal our feral instincts; just think of John Huston, chomping his fish in “Chinatown.” But that movie began with a wonderful script, by Robert Towne, whereas this one, like Polanski’s “Death and the Maiden,” began with a bad play. “God of Carnage,” by Yasmina Reza, was one of those fashionable skits that tickle the liberal consciences of audiences just enough to last them through dinner, and not even Polanski can find grit in its silly provocations—ooh, look, Kate Winslet just threw up over a book! An art book, would you believe? So much for culture! The performances are lusty and concerted, but they remain just that—performances, of the sort that may make you feel you should stagger to your feet at the end and applaud. If so, resist. ♦